The Tale of the Regulator
by wbyeets
Summary: Goth kid Danny ends up with more than he bargained for when he rents a mysterious movie called The Regulator that he's told will scare his stupid friends, Mister Sardo and Doctor Vink, to death.
1. Intro: Midnight Society

**_The scene opens on the Midnight Society's campfire clearing. It is a warm summer night. Fireflies swim lazily through the air and between the trunks of trees, and the moon is bright and full. Suddenly laughing voices can be heard, and then the Midnight Society comes trotting down the path. GARY is in the lead, followed by TUCKER, ERIC, DAVID, BETTY ANN, KIKI, SAMANTHA, FRANK, and KRISTEN. The kids are all dolled up in their best Canadian denim jeans and jackets—except for Frank who is still dressed in his striped prison uniform, complete with hat. As the kids move to their places around the fire, which GARY proceeds to light, a wolf's howl can be heard rising in the distance._**

 **TUCKER: Whose turn is it tonight?**

 **BETTY ANN (standing and going to the storyteller's chair with a proud smile): Mine.**

 **FRANK: Oh great, another _dork_ story about a vampire!**

 **BETTY ANN (annoyed): Shut your butt, FRANK. Does your probation officer know you're here?**

 ** _FRANK looks away, frowning. He stares darkly into the flames and says nothing._**

 **SAMANTHA: _Is_ it going to be a story about vampires?**

 **BETTY ANN: No way. I already told the vampire tale to perfection, remember? "The Tale of the Night Shift"?**

 ** _The kids all shudder, and FRANK leaps involuntarily to his feet. BETTY ANN's "The Tale of the Night Shift" had touched FRANK very deeply. So deeply, in fact, that it had been responsible for a number bedwetting incidents and even a missed court date (he had been too afraid to leave the house, fearing that he would be injured, end up in a hospital, and then be eaten by the vampire from BETTY ANN's absurdly good and horrifying tale)._**

 **GARY (taking his glasses off to swab the lenses with his shirt): Aside from the one about the red acid skeleton that drowns people in the school's swimming pool, that was probably the best and spookiest story anyone here has ever told, BETTY ANN.**

 ** _The kids all nod in agreement._**

 **BETTY ANN: Damn straight. That's why I decided to tell a new kind of story tonight. Have you guys ever heard the phrase "be careful what you wish for"?**

 **FRANK: Nope.**

 **KRISTEN: Hmm, I don't think so.**

 **TUCKER: I haven't even learned to read yet, so…**

 **GARY: Not ringing a bell.**

 **DAVID: Yeah, I'm drawing a blank, too.**

 **ERIC: I already forgot what you asked.**

 **SAM: Never heard it.**

 ** _KIKI attempts to say she doesn't know the phrase either, but she has just lit a joint and is wracked by a huge coughing fit that leaves tears rolling down her cheeks and a silver thread of saliva swinging from her chin like a pendulum._**

 **FRANK: Dude, put that away! If I inhale your secondhand weed smoke and test dirty, they'll put me back in solitary confinement!**

 ** _KIKI laughs and blows smoke in FRANK's face. FRANK screams._**

 **BETTY ANN: Well, it's an old saying that all of you would know if you'd ever picked up a damn book before, or paid attention to any of the stories we previously told around this campfire. Regardless, that's what my story's about; a kid whose neighbors are such dicks that he'd do just about anything to get back at them…**

 ** _BETTY ANN looks ominously at each of her friends' faces, one after another._**

 **BETTY ANN: …even _make evil wishes_.**

 ** _FRANK gasps in fright._**

 **ERIC (loudly): I'm _scared_ of evil wishes!**

 **BETTY ANN: I call this story… _The Tale_ …**

 ** _BETTY ANN throws a handful of the magic mystery dust from the brown sack onto the fire, which causes it to bloom momentarily with a hundred fantastic colors._**

 **BETTY ANN: … _of the Regulator_.**

 ** _The title of the episode swirls in with a crazy '90s trill and hella reverb, just like always. The kids all look at each other with expressions of equal parts anticipation and dread as the scene fades to black._**


	2. The Video Store

**_The next scene opens in a boy's bedroom. The various items decorating the room are extremely '90s-centric. Large posters of Marilyn Manson, The Smashing Pumpkins, Sublime, Fiona Apple, My Bloody Valentine, Garbage, Nirvana, Hole, and Sonic the Hedgehog line the walls like windows to other worlds. A wire hanger mobile hung ironically with plastic skulls dangles from the ceiling. The room is dark and probably quite smelly. A dusty bass guitar that its owner has never bothered to learn much about leans in the corner. Sleeping in the bed is a lump of a person, of which only a wiry sprig of dyed-purple hair is visible._**

 **BETTY ANN'S NARRATION: Danny was a doofy little goth kid who lived with his mom and dad in a trailer park. All he ever wanted to do was listen to music and play Sega Genesis and look up pictures of girls in bikinis on his 28k internet connection, but his mom always wanted him to do stupid things like go to school or play with the neighborhood boys.**

 **TUCKER'S NARRATION: What's a bikini?**

 **BETTY ANN'S NARRATION: Be quiet, TUCKER.**

 **ERIC'S NARRATION: Yeah, dork! Everyone knows what a bikini is!**

 **GARY'S NARRATION (quietly): Yeah, everyone knows that.**

 **BETTY ANN'S NARRATION: Anyway, it was a Friday morning in the middle of summer vacation, and much like every morning, Danny's neighbors were at the door, wanting him to come out and play.**

* * *

Danny's dream broke apart with three sharp bangs on the trailer door. He let out an awful groan and crushed the pillow down over the back of his head, trying as hard as he could to hide from it all. But he couldn't hide from much inside the tiny trailer, and he was powerless to stop himself from hearing his mother get up to answer the knock.

Two voices exclaimed in wobbling, overlapping harmony: "Hi-Missus-Pescatori-can-Danny-come-out-and-plaaaaay." The voices were somewhat droning—they spoke this exact sentence all the time, and its delivery had become a matter of dreary routine.

"Well, boys!" Danny's mother exclaimed. "Let me go and find out!"

"Danny," she shrieked hellishly a few seconds later, just feet from his bed. "Danny, you get'cher ass up and go out and _play_!"

Danny groaned again and rolled over. His eyelids smacked open. He glared at the ceiling, at his skull mobile turning a lazy circle overhead.

"I don't want to play," Danny announced. "I _hate_ Mister Sardo and Doctor Vink."

"Danny!" Danny's mother said, clearly stung. "Those boys are the only friends you _got_! Now it's already past noon, so you get outta bed and go play with 'em!"

"That's Sahh- _doh_ ," Mister Sardo said pettishly outside the trailer. Doctor Vink contributed his opinion in the form of a wild giggle.

Danny's mother drug him out of bed by the ankles. He kicked at her weakly, but she held on tight, and soon he was sprawled on the floor in his pajamas.

"Go play," she ordered.

Ten minutes later, Danny was standing on the steps of his trailer, looking up at the sun. The sun bothered him, due in part to his gothic lineage. Danny's father was goth, as was his father before him, and his father before him. The men of the Pescatori family had always worn eyeshadow and white makeup. Every time Danny spent more than an hour or two outside, he came back in looking like a boiled lobster.

"Hyaah!" Doctor Vink bellowed, waving two plastic light-up He-Man swords savagely above his head, one in each hand, as he and Mister Sardo clambered over the lawn toward Danny in a Power Wheels Jurassic Park jeep.

Danny jumped off the step and dodged the little electric jeep. It traveled slowly and could turn only in wide, sweeping arcs due to the considerable heft of its two occupants. Doctor Vink and Mister Sardo were both portly middle-aged endomorphs with colossal bellies and unkempt sheets of kinked and wiry hair that fell nearly to their shoulder blades. Doctor Vink also had a full beard that quivered below his huge flat face and beady eyes. His mouth was a tiny opening in the beard through which his gnashing teeth could be seen. Each time Doctor Vink ate something, the smell of whatever he had eaten remained like a ghost inside his beard until it was replaced by something else. Doctor Vink was too overweight to either run or jump. He could move about in no fashion other than walking or riding in Mister Sardo's Power Wheels jeep. Mister Sardo had spent his life refusing to learn how to drive a car, and his parents had eventually given up on helping him. He was allowed to transport himself only short distances, to a small collection of pre-approved destinations within the neighborhood, and only by way of the Power Wheels jeep, which had a relatively safe top speed of six miles per hour. Mister Sardo's parents were extremely strict.

"Hyaah! Outlander!" Doctor Vink screeched, trying furiously to turn his head and shoulders far enough around to watch Danny as the jeep made a wobbling turn. "Hyaaaaah!" One of the plastic He-Man swords cartwheeled through the air and landed at Danny's feet.

Danny went to his bike. He mounted it while the jeep was still turning around and charged off in the other direction. The jeep would never be able to catch a boy on a bike.

"Chicken, chicken, bawk bawk," Mister Sardo chanted shrilly. Soon Doctor Vink joined in.

"Chicken, chicken, chick-chick-chicken!"

"Ka- _bawk_!"

"Chicken nuts! Chicken balls!"

"Bawka-bawk-bawk, ka-bawk!"

When Danny was finally around the corner onto the next street and could not longer hear the two men shouting at him, he pulled his bike over and shot the kickstand. He pressed the heels of his palms into his temples and stewed with anger. The wind tumbled his purple hair. Danny hated Mister Sardo and Doctor Vink. He could make no sense of his destiny, his damnation, as their permanent friend. And the fact that his mother not only sanctioned but encouraged his spending time with Doctor Vink and Mister Sardo added up to even less.

Danny took his bike onto the sidewalk and went at a somewhat slower pace through the little town. He made a few random turns, hoping to lose himself in some new scenery, at least for a while. He passed other trailer parks, a Pizza Hut, a Kroger grocery store, a ramshackle post office semi-hidden in a copse of trees. As usual, Danny's thoughts turned to his crush, Emma. Emma was the girl at school for whom Danny had more admiration than any other. She wasn't goth, but some of the ways she conducted herself seemed to suggest gothic instincts. She had a favorite t-shirt with a picture of a Mickey Mouse glove giving a middle finger on it that she wore every second or third day, and she swore more than anybody he had ever met. She had also once been banned from checking books out of the library for returning one that had been hollowed out and filled with the corpse of a frog.

After a while, Danny came upon a strange video store called "Ultraviolence 4 U." Signage in the windows promised the craziest, bloodiest revenge, the most savage sexploitation and blaxploitation, the most shocking wild west massacres, and the most diabolical demonic summonings ever committed to tape. Danny parked his bike and went inside.

"Who goes there?" cawed the store's proprietor—a hunched old man with a cane in each hand and blank white eyeballs that looked soaped over. Danny shrunk back from him and said, "Danny."

"Danny, eh?" the old man said. He sniffed at the air. "Tell me, son: are you goth?"

"How'd you know?"

"Like calls to like," the old man told him triumphantly. He ripped his cardigan open to expose an elaborate chest tattoo of an inverted crucifix being licked by a huge-titted succubus. "I'm goth too!"

"Whoa!" Danny said.

"You like that, eh? What kind of movie are you looking for, son?"

Danny looked around the dusty little store. He and the gothic old man were the only two people in it.

"Something," he said, "that would scare the pants off these two idiots who follow me around. Something really _dark_." He thought eagerly of the possibility scarring Doctor Vink's and Mister Sardo's tiny minds forever with a movie so depraved that no normal human being would be able to stand it.

"I've got just the thing," the gothic old man croaked, and shuffled to a rack of two-for-a-dollar westerns. "Check this out, boy. _The Regulator._ "

Danny took the box from the old man and looked at it. On the cover, a cowboy was riding on two horses at the same time with a foot in each saddle, straddling a desolate dirt road filled with mangled corpses. In each hand he wielded a huge revolver.

"Dang!" Danny said. "What's it about?"

"The Regulator," the old man told him.

"Oh man! Sweet!"

The old man rang up Danny's rental. Then he leaned in so close that Danny could smell the menthol chest rub the old man had used that morning. Danny moved back slightly.

"Don't watch it after midnight, though," the old man warned him. "Remember. Not _one second_ after midnight."

"Why not?" Danny said.

The old man winked one of his dead eyes. "Too scary," he said.

Danny paid and took the video tape out into the afternoon sunlight. It looked to him like any other video tape. But the label simply read, "The Regulator." No film length, rating, or anything else. And there was no store label; nothing at all to suggest it was a rental that had to be returned.

Danny turned to look at the store so he could at least commit the name to memory and saw that there was no store at all. Behind him was an empty lot full of weeds and broken glass bottles.

He tucked the video tape into his jacket and began to pedal home with an uncharacteristic grin on his face. He was extremely excited that the store had disappeared. It was the most gothic thing that had ever happened to him.


	3. The Plan Solidifies

Danny arrived home to an empty yard. Mister Sardo and Doctor Vink had apparently given up their watch for him. Even Doctor Vink's light-up He-Man sword had been retrieved. Danny parked his bike by the side of the trailer and went up through the weedy path to the door.

"Mom?" Danny asked timidly once inside, shuffling his feet and making puppy dog eyes. "Can Doctor Vink and Mister Sardo sleep over tonight?"

Danny's mom knew he was up to something right away. Not only did Danny openly hate his two friends and would never want them near the inside of the trailer under any ordinary circumstances, but he was also holding something behind his back.

"What you got behind your back, mister?"

" _The Regulator,_ " he told her. "It's a movie."

"What's it about?" his mom demanded. " _Goth stuff_?" She was more or less permanently on guard against any new goth stuff Danny might try to introduce into their lives. The posters, the loud music, the dyed hair, and the omnipresent smells she already had to deal with were bad enough.

"No way! It's about cowboys!"

"What's it rated?"

Danny thought for a minute. "G," he said cleverly.

Danny's mom put her hands on her hips and leaned forward to give him an interrogative glare. "What're its central themes?"

"Uh, friendship, overcoming adversity, not skipping any school," Danny droned, gazing blankly at the ceiling, "donating fire water to the Indians, going to church, eating healthy and getting enough sleep, not swearing, respecting the sheriff, aaaand…" He probed deeply in his mind for the final theme that would lock in the sleepover. "Uh, keeping the street clean."

"That movie's about keeping the street clean?"

"Yes'm!"

"Well," Danny's mom supposed, "I guess it's okay if Mister Sardo and Doctor Vink sleep over just this once, then. As long as you boys keep it quiet and don't play any goth music."

"Aw, mom!"

"No goth music!" Danny's mom screamed, and whammed the side of the refrigerator with her fist. "If I hear even so much as a drum machine tonight I'll stick my hand down the garbage disposal."

Danny looked at the floor and sighed. His mom threatened to stick her hand down the garbage disposal all the time. In the past week alone she had wanted to put her hand down the garbage disposal in protest of the ants in Danny's room, an unusual stain that had come home with Danny on the back of one of his shirts, the way Danny "ran funny," and the big tabloid reveal that one of her favorite celebrities identified as gothic. She had also threatened to stick _both_ hands down the garbage disposal if Danny ever tested positive for Crack Cocaine, a substance that had gained proper noun status in her mind after seeing the infamous Pee-wee Herman PSA.

The door to the trailer suddenly banged open and Danny's dad came inside, home from his high-powered office job.

"Whew," he announced grandly as he crossed the trailer to the sofa and laid his briefcase on the ottoman.

"How was your day, dear?" Danny's mom asked.

Danny's dad loosened his tie and sank back into the cushions. "Oh," he said, "you know. Another long one. Two new clients, plus the Proulx account. And the boss was all over my ass about the crow makeup again."

"Watch your language!" Danny's mom screamed, pulling a spatula from the sink to brandish at him like a butcher knife. "You'll corrupt the boy!"

"How was _your_ day, sport?" Danny's dad asked, and reached to ruffle Danny's snarly purple head.

"It was all right I guess. I'm going to have my friends over tonight to watch a movie. You don't mind, do you? Dad?"

Danny's dad's face had clouded over. He got up from the couch and took a towel from the countertop, which he began using to clean the white makeup from his face. He was careful, going to great lengths not to get any makeup or water on his expensive suit. He owned dozens of tailored Armanis and could easily afford a dozen more, but one of the reasons he had been able to so swiftly climb the corporate ladder was the great care with which he always treated his belongings.

"Those two neighbor boys?" Danny's dad asked apprehensively.

"Yeah, Mister Sardo and Doctor Vink."

Danny's dad, peering into the broken shard of mirror glued above the sink, carefully mopped the black from his left eyelid. "I'm not too sure about those guys, Danny. Sometimes I get a bad feeling about that one with the beard in particular. Don't you know any nice girls you'd like to invite over instead?"

"Girls?!" Danny cried, seeing in his mind a gleaming vision of a bikinied Emma rising seductively on a billow of red smoke from a pit full of flaming serpents.

"Yeah, kiddo, girls. You're not afraid of _girls_ , are you?"

"No way! I just, uh—I want to hang out with Mister Sardo and Doctor Vink tonight, that's all."

Danny went awkwardly into his room and shut the door.

"I'm worried about Danny," Danny's dad said conspiratorially to his wife. "How's he ever going to get laid if he keeps hanging around with those two weird guys? There's something wrong with them."

"He'll never get laid, all right," Danny's mom answered, plunging her hands back into the soapy dishwater. "But it's your fault. Teaching him about all that goth shit. No young man should—"

"But goth shit is the _best_!" Danny's dad protested.

"It's embarrassing!" she screamed. "You're forty-three years old! Why do you still need to have those blue LEDs in the footwells of your car?"

"Because they're sweet!" Danny's dad cried. "Honestly, Sandra, again? My dad was a goth too, as you may remember. What's next? Why don't we dive back into the subject of the old man's face tats? Or how about the custom bloodred coffin I paid twenty thousand dollars to have him buried in? That's one of your favorites, isn't it?"

"I don't like Danny listening to that goth music! He should be listening to wholesome stuff like Neil Diamond and Boyz II Men. Not childish crap like… _VERUCA SALT_!" For some reason Danny's mother had taken a particularly strong disliking to Veruca Salt.

"Don't talk shit about goth music!" Danny's father bellowed. His eyeballs bulged with fury.

" _Talk_ shit? It _is_ shit!" Danny's mother hissed. "I'd rather stick my hand down the garbage disposal than find the wrapper from a Veruca Salt CD in my boy's room someday!"

Danny's dad threw his hands up in weary dismay. "Veruca Salt's not even goth, Sandra, they're _grunge_!"

"There's overlap!" Danny's mother shrieked.

This was a familiar argument in the Pescatori household, one Danny had heard through his bedroom door hundreds if not thousands of times. It was worn smooth with use and mostly ran itself on autopilot, even when both participants appeared to be completely engaged. Danny didn't mind when his parents started arguing about goth stuff because it usually ended with his dad sulking off to the friendly territory of Danny's bedroom to help his son hang new goth posters and to recommend new goth albums in an effort to reassure himself that Danny was turning out right after all.

"Don't listen to your mother," Danny's dad said, shaking his head and closing Danny's bedroom door behind him. He came over to sit on the bed. "In fact, you shouldn't even listen to _me_. One of the most important parts of being goth is telling your parents to go fuck themselves, no matter what it is they're trying to get you to do. If you want to hang out with those two messed up weirdos from down the block, you go right ahead." He ruffled Danny's hair and gave him a warm smile.

"Thanks, Dad."

"You betcha, son." Danny's dad chuckled wonderingly to himself. "You know, when I was your age, I swore I'd never turn out like my old man. Him and his dorky face paint and tendrils of black hair and his jacket covered in vestigial zippers and anarchy pins and diamond studs. Little did I know it was all part of his long con. Not wanting to turn out like your old man is the most gothic thing there is."

After Danny's dad had cheered himself up and gone back out into the trailer's main room to see what was for dinner, Danny turned and looked at the phone on his desk. Afraid of girls or not, he had to admit it would be pretty metal to call Emma on that phone. Probably even more metal than mentally damaging Mister Sardo and Doctor Vink with the scary movie he'd rented.

The movie! Danny turned the boxy VHS over in his hands and ran his fingertips along the edges, imagining the lightless inner chambers, wishing he could know in advance what insanities they held.

"Who is this?" Mister Sardo demanded in a high-pitched whine when he had answered the phone.

"Danny Pescatori, from down the street."

The line was quiet for a moment.

"Yes, Mister _Pest-_ catori? What is it?"

"That's Pesca _tor_ i!" Danny screamed, and whacked the surface of his desk. "No Mister! Accent on the 'tor'!"

"What do you want!" Mister Sardo pleaded, realizing he was outmatched.

"You wanna come over tonight and watch a movie? You and Doctor Vink?"

Danny could hear the plastic receiver of Mister Sardo's telephone creaking in his meaty paw. "Watch a _movie_?!" he demanded.

"Yeah, I just rented it. It's an ultraviolent shockfest about gunslingers and dead people and stuff."

"A movie?" Danny heard a man's voice roar distantly from the background of Mister Sardo's house. "What's it rated?"

"What's it rated?" Mister Sardo whispered feverishly.

"X."

"It's rated PG, Dad!" Mister Sardo screamed over his shoulder.

"Just get Doctor Vink and show up at my house around 10," Danny told him. "It'll be awesome."

"What should I wear?" Mister Sardo wondered. He sounded excited.

"What?" Danny said. "Who cares? Clothes."

"Will there be any girls there, though?"

Danny's heart gave a hard thump for Emma, wherever she was.

"No. Just you and me and Vink."

A relieved exhale rattled in Danny's ear.

"All right," Mister Sardo conceded, returning to his usual peevish and vaguely aristocratic tone. "We'll be there. I _guess._ "

Danny hung up the phone and took the video tape back into his hands. He sat for a long while simply looking at it, perhaps to prevent it from simply vanishing, like the old man, into thin air.


	4. The Viewing

**After a series of commercials trying to sell the viewing audience some Duncan yo-yos, Pizza Hut pizzas, Snick, and the concept of a "helmet day," which the advert strongly implies is actually every day, the Midnight Society fades back in seated around their campfire in the woods.**

 **FRANK: Veruca Salt isn't even grunge, they're bubblegum pop with a reverb pedal and an octaver.**

 **GARY: Come on, FRANK. Veruca Salt is easily grunge.**

 **BETTY-ANN: Well, their first album—**

 **FRANK (rearranging his underwear): "Seether" is practically their only song. All their albums should just be eleven tracks of "Seether."**

 **SAMANTHA (looking reverently around at her friends and leaning forward a bit): I love "Seether." I think it's about her cat.**

 **ERIC: It's about her temper, dork!**

 **BETTY-ANN: The music video prominently features cats. I think it's about a cat, too.**

 **TUCKER (chewing on a mouthful of God-knows-what): Ummuff a thing iddabud the wuh uh muh—**

 ** _FRANK smacks TUCKER upside the back of his head, causing him to spray half-chewed chunks of food into the fire. The fire erupts in color, just like with the magic dust._**

 **KIKI: Whoa. Did you guys just see that?**

 ** _TUCKER coughs and gags raucously._**

 **GARY: Let's just get back to the story.**

 **BETTY-ANN: Right.**

* * *

Danny's blood froze in his veins as he watched Mister Sardo and Doctor Vink pull up to his trailer in the Power Wheels jeep. Doctor Vink was done up extravagantly, dressed in leather moccasins, pressed slacks, a toy wrestling belt his parents had got for him at the dollar store, a red Christmas sweater that was so small it barely covered half his hairy stomach, an expensive-looking white bowtie, and his football helmet and shoulder pads, with his beard tightly bound in the style of the Egyptian pharaohs. But the outfit Mister Sardo had chosen was even more offensive: he was wearing cowboy boots, skinny jeans, and a Veruca Salt t-shirt.

"Take that off!" Danny screamed, running down the lawn to meet them. When he reached the jeep he removed Mister Sardo from the driver's seat with a flying tackle that sent them both rolling halfway down the lawn.

"What the deuce!" Mister Sardo cried breathlessly.

"Take that shirt off!"

"Get your hand away from there—"

Danny ripped the edge of the shirt out from under Mister Sardo's belt and Mister Sardo loosed a girlish squeal of pure misery. They scuffled for what felt like hours but, according to Doctor Vink's stopwatch, was only about ten seconds.

"You idiot! My mom will never let you in wearing a shirt like this!"

Mister Sardo was bewildered but eventually conceded the shirt and went with Doctor Vink and Danny into the trailer. He looked like a wad of uncooked dough with his torso bared and his lower half crammed into the skinny jeans.

"Who's that," Danny's mom yelled, spatula raised defensively, as the three boys climbed in through the trailer's narrow door. "Oh! Boys! Mister Sardo, where is your shirt?!"

"He doesn't own a shirt," Danny immediately said, passing the balled-up Veruca Salt tee behind his back and swiftly into the garbage can.

"Shirts!" Mister Sardo said, turning beet red as Danny's mom's eyes drilled into his flabby breasts. "Intolerable! I never wear a shirt, myself. And that's Sah _-doh_!" he snapped.

Doctor Vink's tiny eyes flicked wildly from the kitchen sink to Danny's bedroom door. He was breathing very loudly inside the football helmet.

"Are you boys excited to watch that street cleaning movie? I'll be in with cookies and milk in just a little while," Danny's mom said with a warm smile.

"The hell she will," Danny announced a minute later, in his room with his two friends, as he wedged a chair underneath the cheap plastic latch of his door.

"Street cleaning?" Doctor Vink said in a terrified voice. "I thought we were going to watch _Fern Gully_!"

"You imbecile!" Mister Sardo shrieked. He turned to Danny and said with a wicked smile, "I told him it was going to be _Fern Gully._ Tell him what we're _really_ watching, Pest-catori."

"I rented a violent-ass cowboy movie," Danny said, holding the sacred VHS in his hands. "The cover was a picture of a cowboy riding on two horses at the same time, and he had _guns_. And the old man who ran the video store was gothic."

"What video store was this?" Mister Sardo demanded. "What kind of video store would be run by an aging goth?"

"I dunno, it was just some little mom and pop magic video store."

Danny put the tape into the mouth of his VCR, which brought a terrified scream from Doctor Vink. Mister Sardo slapped him upside the back of the helmet and said, "It hasn't even started yet!" The video tape disappeared into the VCR with a series of clicks and whirrs. The screen of Danny's boxy little television lit and suddenly they were all looking at a garbage can. The scene was utterly silent. There was no color. The image flickered and jumped sideways before returning to the center. Nothing happened. Doctor Vink was quivering in terror and Mister Sardo's nipples had become very hard. Suddenly the lid of the can began to move.

"Is this the right movie?" Mister Sardo asked.

Danny shrugged irritably. "Just watch!" he commanded, and Mister Sardo turned back to the TV.

The grainy image of the garbage can went on flickering and jumping slightly as the lid popped up, slid sideways, and eventually tumbled to the ground. Two gnarled hands crept over the edge of the can and squeezed tight on the rim. A figure began to haul itself up.

"You said it would be _Fern Gully_ ," Doctor Vink cried helplessly. He and Danny and Mister Sardo were staring unblinkingly at the screen, unable to tear their attention away from the thing climbing from the garbage can. Its arms writhed out and were then joined by a pair of pointed shoulders and a hung head wreathed in a flat-crown gunslinger's hat. The thing's eyes were glowing pits, seeming holes in reality, that jerked from Danny's face to those of his two friends. It grinned. Its teeth had been filed to points.

 _"Goth-ic!"_ Danny cheered.

The skeletal gunslinger continued climbing out of the garbage gan, now strained its arms until they shook. The can rocked and fell over. The gunslinger flopped out like a wounded and angry fish but was soon on its feet. It resembled a scarecrow recently paroled from the pits of hell, and as the three boys watched, it drew twin pistols from the holsters on its hips.

And it began to walk forward, toward the camera.

"I want to go home!" Mister Sardo screamed.

"You dorks think _this_ is scary?" Danny said. "I've seen some shit on the internet that would give you nightmares for the rest of your _life_ compared to this. Have you guys ever heard of goatse—"

The Regulator (for it could be no one else) was right up to the television's screen now, darkening the frame and crouching to peer into the room with its missing eyes. It reached to tap on the glass with the barrel of one of the revolvers. _Tink! Tink tink!_

Danny laughed. "What do you guys think? Pretty good?"

"NOOOOOoooooo _ooooOOOO!_ " Doctor Vink squealed.

Danny couldn't have been happier with this result. A hokey old black and white cowboy movie had melted Doctor Vink's brain! It might have even—

Then Danny realized that he couldn't move. His eyes could still flick about, but he had otherwise turned into a frozen slab. He looked at Vink and Sardo and then at the screen, where the Regulator was still tapping. Tapping and widening a small crack it had created.

 _This is too gothic to be happening_ , his brain insisted cheerfully. _Right?_ Then he looked up at his radio alarm clock and saw that it was 11:58.

Somehow they had been watching the movie for almost _two hours_.

Panic began to settle into his bones and burn in his sinuses. Breath ran quick and hot through Danny's frozen windpipe. He couldn't have said how long they had been sitting there—his sense of time had been whisked cleanly away, as if by a hit of LSD—but he knew the alarm clock wasn't lying. They'd been sitting so long just staring at the strange images on the screen that his muscles and bones ached furiously. Confusion and horror ricocheted in his head. His eyes whipped to his bedroom door, which he saw was now the ancient, rickety type from a 19th century saloon. His desk had magically transformed into an old poker table. The walls were melting, changing. All his posters had turned from portraits of goth bands into portraits of old cowboys with grim, hateful eyes. Danny looked at Mister Sardo and saw that the man's flabby body had shriveled into something that looked embalmed. A hole yawned in his side, exposing several blackened ribs, and his face had sunken in and dried up, leaving no expression other than a skeletal scream. Mister Sardo's head creaked slowly around on its neck to look at Danny.

"Great movie, Pest-catori," came Mister Sardo's voice conversationally from out of the shriveled husk's mouth. "Too bad it's getting so… _late_."

Danny cranked his eyes back to the clock and saw that it was 12:00. As he watched in terror, the clock flashed to 12:01.

The screen of the television shattered and went dark, and Danny saw one of the Regulator's arms, still clutching the pistol, flop out from inside to paw the floor like a probing antenna.

Danny was still trying to scream when he passed out.


End file.
